Reflections on Fall and Rosh Hashana

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Nicki

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. For me. Possibly my favorite time. Sweet wishes and loud kisses. Crisp sweet apples, sticky honey and rosy pomegranates full of hope and promise.

I grew up in a place where the sweet anticipation of the Jewish new year – Rosh Hashana – made sense in nature. September is spring in the southern hemisphere, where the earlier-rising sun, fragrant jasmine, fresh-cut grass and tentatively tweeting birds color the day’s gentle breezes with renewal, rebirth and hope.

We dipped round apples into amber honey, prayed and wished for a sweet year, tasted the first bright yellow peaches, and the soft smells and colors and sounds of spring were warm and obvious reminders of life and creation. Rosh Hashana (literally translated as Head of the Year): the birthday of the world.

But here above the equator, the days are imperceptibly shorter. The birds have flown, the grass is too long and the light is low. Vibrant pink and green give way to gentle gold and brown. It’s fall.

Summer is fading, winter is coming… and still, it’s my most favorite time of the year. The promise of creation is everywhere. It’s Rosh Hashana.

The moon, the first of this new Jewish year, is a thinly curved sliver hanging low in an inky sky. Breathtakingly simple. Quiet and bright. Trees are fiercely ablaze in orange, deep red and yellow. There’s been little to no rain all year, no drop in California’s sunny temperature for hundreds of days, but the green leaves still yield to the changing light, the traveling sun and, as the earth turns, those beautiful fiery branches ignite hope.

My love of the fall has surprised and delighted me. I am a sun-loving girl raised way down south, where my favorite time of year was always Rosh Hashana in the scented, hopeful spring.

But, as summer slowly fades into fall here, I feel compelled to reflect on a year both euphoric and difficult, a year of war and of celebration, a year of illness and loss and also one of life and encouragement. I feel inspired now, when I am eating orange persimmons instead of peaches, to celebrate creation even as nature is preparing to hibernate, to wish for a sweet new year of bright light and promise as the night falls earlier and quicker.

It’s the birthday of the world. And birthdays are for celebrating. For wishing. For hoping. For reflecting, and re-evaluating. Spring in the south and fall up north, birthdays carry the promise of life. Possibly of love and smiles and thoughtfully good intention.

My favorite time of year. Time for pumpkins and pomegranates and apples dipped in honey.

And also, fall is definitely time for red boots.

This post was inspired by my friend Michelle T’s beautiful insight on Creation. Thank you Michelle for your wisdom (and for encouraging me to think and not just eat my way through the holiday!).

Quarter of a Cent-Cherry

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Nicki

Great conversation, loud laughter, fun stories. Inside jokes and quick-witted comments and the type of easy, comfortable banter that comes from many years together, from shared experiences and milestones, difficult times, tears, proud moments, pure elation and happiness. From close friendship.

The air is dry, and the trees are tall, and it’s rustic and gorgeous.

Tahoe, California. Spring. 2014.

South Lake Tahoe

Was it really twenty five years ago that I was half a world away, breathing air as dry, amongst trees as tall, hanging out in somebody’s rustic bunk, cocooned by esoteric jokes and hysterical laughter and the closest of friends?

Lapalala Wilderness, South Africa. Fall. 1989.

Fifteen years old, on a week-long wilderness program in the Limpopo Province with my tenth grade class, it was the very best of times. I loved all those school retreats to simple, woodsy places in the Highveld, where it was very, very cold in the early morning and at night, sweltering hot in between. When we were woken at the crack of dawn, and saw the mist rising with the African sun. Ate cornflakes and toast with thick peanut butter and bananas for breakfast, and then packed it all up for a long hike to learn about the Toothbrush Plant, and how to belay down a mountainside. Walking in smaller groups of twos and threes, paired off with my crush of the moment, or sharing wild hopes and dreams with my BFF while the hadedas called to each other in the broiling heat.

Lapalala Wilderness

Mixed tapes played Men at Work and Phil Collins, Roxette and Milli Vanilli on portable boom boxes. We dismissed every rule late into the night, breaking curfew the very least of it. The girls snuck into the boys’ bunks (never the other way around), and we told secrets and broke promises and huddled together to keep warm.

My 25-year-old memories haunt me lately. I keep coming back to that year, 1989, when life just worked. For me. It wasn’t always like that before, and almost never again, but that year the music was right, and school was okay, and my siblings were fun and my parents understood (or they pretended to) and, most important of all at 15, my friends were perfect in every way.

Twenty five years later many of those friends are still perfect to me in every way. As I gaze out at the impossibly tall Tahoe pine trees, I ache to have them closer to me – we are scattered all over the Earth – to share inside jokes, and laugh at nothing, and sing Land Down Under out of tune at the top of our lungs.

A burst of laughter pulls me away from 1989 – I focus on the faces around me. They are warm and happy, smiling and talking. Faces I know and love. Here I am, twenty five years later, half a world up and away, with friends that are perfect to me… in every way.

Quarter of a Cent-Cherry by OPI

This post was written as part of the April A to Z Challenge. To read more of my A to Z posts click here.

Dutch Tulips

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Nicki

Daffodils and paperwhites. Freesia and wisteria. Purple, white and blue hygrangeas bursting on bushes. Jasmine – my favorite, sweetly scenting the breezes. And tulips.

tulips_white Hundreds of them, all over town. A floral sunrise of yellow, orange and pinky-red. Deep inky purple and purest white, tall and properly proud – they’re always the most elegant, those two, especially when standing together.

I’m a Spring Soul. I think it’s serendipity that I moved to the northern hemisphere where the season I was born into is now Spring. It heralds new beginnings, promises light and sunshine, colors are shyly showing themselves and the soft air seeps into my skin and swirls around my bones, gently warming me up from the inside out.

But it’s those springful smells that soothe my soul. Heady jasmine that always makes me smile and tear, tugging the nostalgic strings of my heart where my favorite South African memories live. Wisteria that wafts over me in a cloud of purple when I walk by the Rockridge library, and bunches of fragrant freesia I buy at Trader Joe’s – both take me back to long walks on campus with my best friend, another Spring Soul. She taught me that wisteria is called wisteria, and we would give each other freesia bouquets of yellow and white to fill the jars in our dorm rooms. Her birthday is in the southern hemisphere Spring – where she lives.

We barely had a winter here in California – the sun shone all through December and January, there was no rain, and despite a deluge of water this past week, the snowpack is still dangerously low.

But Spring still sprung. With every seasonal symptom. Color and light and bees and flowers and vibrant greens everywhere. Softly soothing smells. And tulips.

Dutch Tulips by OPI www.beautymaniacs.org

Dutch Tulips by OPI
http://www.beautymaniacs.org

This is 40?

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Nicki

I was always the youngest. Not at home, at home I was the oldest. But everywhere else I was usually the youngest. The youngest in my grade. The youngest in my ballet or drama class. Because I have the southern hemisphere equivalent of a fall birthday – mid-May.

And half a world and many decades away, where the seasons are turned upside down, and where my birthday is now in the spring, I am still the youngest.

My 40^th birthday is two months away. Thanks to a severe drought and global warming, spring has already sprung in Northern California. So it’ll be early summer by then. The fragrant jasmine will have wilted on their stems, leaving little more than the faintest heady whiff in the breeze.

For a while I was “never turning 40.” As friend after friend – some with two to four kids of their own, and companies to run, with aging parents and mortgages and expiring car leases – made it ‘over the hill’, turned 41 or 43 or 47, I was still in my thirties. In the same pick-up line as they were, rushing kids to ERs just like they were, signing tax returns and home loans and sometimes feeling older than even my older friends whose kids were a few years younger than mine, or who didn’t want to get married just yet.

Almost 40. With responsibilities and people, both big and little, and deadlines and obligations and appointments and a full life of color behind me, and a big blue something ahead… but I’m not excited. I’m scared. Confused. So unsure. So not confident. I wish I was 24. When I knew myself better.

Of course, hindsight is always crisply clear – the view of myself as the self-confident, sure-of-herself young woman starting her life on the foggy hills of San Francisco as Mrs Gilbert is vivid and bright, while the vision of ageing, graying me finally moving to Israel once all my kids are grown is hazy and almost impossible to see. Not just because it’s the future, and who knows what the future holds, but because… is that what I really want to do? Do I want to leave all my kids behind and move to another country without them? Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know. If I stop being a stay-at-home mom now, will I regret it in ten years when they’ve all left (actually it’s 13 years, but who’s counting)? Do I want to write, or act, or teach, or own a boutique or work in a bookstore or WHAT?

I am 60-something days away from the fabulous-not-so-fabulous four oh. Confused. Confuzzled (my mother’s word). Just mixed up.

On a rare rainy day in Sonoma last week, after I declared to my best girlfriends that I knew myself better when I was in my twenties than I do now, I realized that’s not quite true. Or rather, they helped me realize it’s not true. That what I was in my seemingly cool, calm and collected twenties was blissfully oblivious… to me. And I started thinking about the things I do know:

I know that I don’t know. I know that I am confuzzled. I may be less self-assured, less self-confident than ever before – but I have heaps of self-awareness. And then some. Enough to drive me even crazier than I am now, before I make it to 50. Or even 45. Gulp.

I know that it’s more than okay to say “no”. Not to alcohol. Or to cupcakes. But to commitments. To volunteering. To having someone else’s kid over. To attending an event. To anything that is something I do not want to do. Or that will take me away from doing something I really do want to do. People understand. In fact, I think they wish they had said no too.

That sometimes my “greatest accomplishment of the day is making my bed.” This is something my close friend L always says – she is five years calmer, wiser and older than me. She reminds me that I don’t have to do it all – actually, I don’t have to do any. That the all or the nothing is overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be that way. And damn, she’s right about the bed: it does feel all kinds of good to yank those sheets straight, and tuck the loose ends under.

I know that I love meat. And marrow bones.

To cry is to feel. And that is wonderful. I used to keep my tears in, because I didn’t want to face the emotional hot mess they left in their wake. But I’ve discovered how awesome tears are – the relief and release to not have to keep it all together. To feel whenever I want. Even wherever I want. Like in my workout class. Or in the car. Sadness and joy and love and fear and songs and memories.

I don’t get hangovers. Obviously I’m not drinking enough. Goal for my forties: wake up with a hangover.

There’s never an excuse for bad manners. Say hello. Say goodbye. Say please and thank you. Always. Whether you’re four, or 14 or 57. Do not get out my car and slam the door without saying, “Thanks for the ride.” Wish the barmitzvah boy and his parents mazal tov, and if you want something from me, please say please! Manners make people nice people, manners maketh the mensch.

Accept apologies – they are heartfelt, even if they don’t sound like they are.

Skinny jeans can ruin my day as I lie on the floor or wriggle my hips trying to zip them up – they did fit last week. But my sister, and sometimes my brother, saves the day (and this is true for much in my life):

Finally, no matter what artistic brilliance, technologically advanced special effects, incredible animation, outstanding acting, writing or directing we have enjoyed over the last three decades the very best movies are, and always will be, Eighties Movies: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Moonstruck, Indiana Jones, Say Anything. Don’t you order what she’s having? Do you ever put Baby in a corner? Who doesn’t love to cut loose with Kevin and Kenny? Best. Movies. Ever.

I am the last of my friends to turn 40. I’m the youngest. And I feel more confused now than at any other time in my life. Blissfully oblivious, like I was in my twenties, sounds kinda appealing, I admit. But oblivious is really just oblivious – I’m not sure it’s blissful at all.

I’ll take marrow bones, Maverick and no hangover for now.